Book cover
An incredible tale of inveteracy, the attempts to escape from it - and of love, which saves the day, Jerzy Pilch's The Mighty Angel was awarded the most eminent Polish literary prize NIKE in 2001.
In the opening lines of Pilch’s novel The Mighty Angel, Juruś says, "Before (…) the stormy events that I wish to talk about took place (...) I was drinking peach schnapps. That’s right, I was drinking peach schnapps, I was enveloped in an animal-like yearning for the last love before death and I was up to my ears in a licentious existence." [editor’s translation]. Juruś, the novel's protagonist, is a writer and chronic alcoholic living a never-ending cycle of detox, rehab, happy departures from institutions and returns to his empty apartment, abandoned by both his wives. Eventually he ends up in his local bar, The Mighty Angel. Literary critic Lech Mergler writes, "In this book, Pilch prattles on and on remorselessly in his masterly way, bends the reader's ear, fills the mind, grips the attention - and before you know where you are, you've reached the end of the book."
Jerzy Pilch’s novel The Mighty Angel was awarded the NIKE, Poland's most eminent literary prize, in 2009. Considered Poland’s most famous story of alcoholism, it is compared to Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano and Venedikt Erofeev’s Moscow-Petushki. It was translated into English by Bill Johnston as The Mighty Angel in 2009, and adapted into a theatre piece at the Polonia Theatre in Warsaw in 2012. In 2014 the book comes out as a movie directed by Wojciech Smarzowski called Angel.
Jerzy Pilch (b. 1952) is one of the most popular contemporary Polish writers, and is the author of unusually amusing, ironically philosophical novels.
